Before anyone takes this title the wrong way... read some of it. It is funny, and sadly, mostly true. Of course, Unix has changed plenty since the time of this book (eg it doesn't crash daily anymore), but a lot of what they say here is still true (eg man pages).

Here are some gems...

In a previous job selling Lisp Machines, I was often asked aboutUnix. If the audience was not mixed gender, I would sometimescompare Unix to herpesâ€”lots of people have it, nobody wants it,they got screwed when they got it, and if they could, they would getrid of it. There would be smiles, heads would nod, and that wouldusually end the discussion about Unix.

[i]â€œI liken starting oneâ€™s computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate,
to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your
body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you
suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East
Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live
within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They
already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act.â€

The book covers SOOO much ground that my quotes really only cover a fraction of the 360 (or so) pages. The whole section discussing the nightmare that is Sendmail is hilarious. It is amazing that it could survive this long. The idea that sysadmins really didn't exist until Unix came around is also very enlightening. There was no need... things just worked. Unfortunately, as with much of history, one of spoils of war is often being able to rewrite history in a favorable light. Thankfully, gems like the Unix-Haters Handbook exist to help us keep some perspective on things.

Appendix A contains an excellent account of how vastly inferior software, which Unix certainly was during the 80's and early 90's, was able to dethrone TOPS and LISPM systems. It should be required reading for every introduction to operating systems course.

I've read some of this book so far and tell that at least of it is still relevant, but how much of this book is still relevant.

Well, you still have disparity between flavors of Unix, sendmail (and others) still mangle message headers, cryptic commands with non-standard command switches, the hate for vi will never go away, and a host of others.

The big thing is that all of these issues are handled much better now. No one really cares about the differences between flavors anymore because building a program for your specific machine does not take days any more especially if there is a package manager, the MTA issues are handled much better by both the system and the clients, commands have evolved, and well, there will always be hate for vi.

Most of the complaints are reduced to mere annoyances now but in some cases that is not due to improvements in the system it is due to evolution of technology.

Error Messages and Error Checking, NOT!This section talks about the lack of error message and error checking. One would hope this area has gotten somewhat better over the years. Hope is in short supply though. Again, I'm not sure if this specific example would still happen, but it would really piss me off if it did... % cc -o doit.c doitinstead of:% cc -o doit doit.cNeedless to say I have lost doit.c

I don't know if it was exactly this, but something like this happened to me (fortunately I was working on the file at the time and the editor I was using allowed me to re-save it, so I didn't lose any work).

Error Messages and Error Checking, NOT!This section talks about the lack of error message and error checking. One would hope this area has gotten somewhat better over the years. Hope is in short supply though. Again, I'm not sure if this specific example would still happen, but it would really piss me off if it did... % cc -o doit.c doitinstead of:% cc -o doit doit.cNeedless to say I have lost doit.c

I don't know if it was exactly this, but something like this happened to me (fortunately I was working on the file at the time and the editor I was using allowed me to re-save it, so I didn't lose any work).

So that's why there are all those filename~ files being created in emacs! =)

I remember coming across one really onerous use of env vars in Unix one time.... IIRC, this guy had managed to concatenate the values in two different env vars somehow or had managed to use the value of one env var as a kind of pointer for the name of another... I forget now, but I wanted to KILL someone over that nonsense.

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